Replies to post #172278 on Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

Boston Globe profiles TMO—one of the largest biotech companies many biotech investors know nothing about:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/01/12/thermo-fisher-thinks-smaller/bKjLRAFyi8CiJ1HyDmRhgO/story.html

Thermo has 39,000 employees, roughly $13 billion in annual revenues, and a stock you definitely should have bought five or 10 years ago. Yet, unless you wear a white lab coat at work, chances are you don’t run into Thermo’s products — like its $500,000 Q Exactive Hybrid Quadrupole-Orbitrap Mass Spectrometer — very often.

… the company called Thermo Electron [was] founded in 1956… That maker of lab equipment and related products merged with an even older business, Fisher Scientific, in 2006. And the Waltham company is still growing: Last spring, it announced a $13.6 billion acquisition of Life Technologies [#msg-86836458)], a San Diego company with 10,000 employees that makes a range of equipment for sequencing DNA and ensuring food safety, among other things.

… One of the company’s newest hand-held products, introduced in 2012, is the TruNarc analyzer, which looks like an overgrown GPS device crossed with a tablet computer. It uses a laser to identify pills, powders, and other suspicious substances. … there are hundreds of TruNarc devices being used in 17 countries, by police, customs, and border patrol officers. The price tag is just shy of $20,000.

TMO is like a much larger (and better managed) version of PKI, a company I sold at a nice profit in mid 2013 (#msg-88042387).